Saturday 29 July 2006 18.59 EDT
First published on Saturday 29 July 2006 18.59 EDT

Were the ancients in the habit of reading silently, or did they normally read out loud? Three weeks ago, discussing certain famous passages in St Augustine's Confessions, I mentioned that St Ambrose's habit of silent reading was clearly unique to him and a novelty to Augustine when he encountered it in Milan. Soon afterwards I received a letter from Myles Burnyeat of All Souls, Oxford. "I fear," says Professor Burnyeat, "you are one of numerous victims of a widespread myth, a serious misreading of Augustine. Since it has been a minor mission in my life to combat this myth, I take the liberty of enclosing two articles designed to set the record straight."

The two articles, one by AK Gavrilov, the other by Burnyeat himself, first appeared in Classical Quarterly (47, 1997). They trace to early German scholarship the almost universal, erroneous belief that in the classical world people read aloud to themselves rather than silently. Here is Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, section 247, berating the sloppy reading habits of his day: "The German does not read aloud, does not read for the ear, but merely with his eyes: he has put his ears away in the drawer. In antiquity, when a man read - which he did very seldom - he read to himself ... in a loud voice; it was a matter for surprise if someone read quietly, and people secretly asked themselves why he did so. In a loud voice: that is to say, with all the crescendos, inflections, variations of tone and changes of tempo in which the ancient public world took pleasure."

What Nietzsche is saying is not only that, if you "put your ears away in the drawer" you will miss the point of classical prose style, but also that you yourself will write badly. The greatest German prose hitherto, he goes on to argue, came from the pulpit, and its masterpiece is Luther's Bible. "Compared with Luther's Bible almost everything else is merely 'literature' - a thing that has not grown up in Germany and therefore has not taken and does not take root in German hearts: as the Bible has done."

It is a myth that the ancients only or normally read out loud - a myth we appear to want to believe, since the evidence against it is strong. In Euripides's Hippolytus, the King, Theseus, confronted with the corpse of his wife, Phaedra, finds a letter fastened to her hand. While the Chorus expresses its foreboding, Theseus silently reads the letter (which contains Phaedra's false accusation that Hippolytus has raped her). Then he has an outburst, whose meaning takes force from his silent reading. The letter, he says, "shrieks, it howls horrors insufferable ... a voice from the letter speaks ..."

Plutarch, in a speech called "On the Fortune of Alexander", tells us that, when Alexander the Great was silently reading a confidential letter from his mother, Hephaestion his friend "quietly put his head beside Alexander's and read the letter with him; Alexander could not bear to stop him, but took off his ring and placed the seal on Hephaestion's lips". Plutarch tells this story four times: the point is that Alexander does not have a fit of temper at his friend's presumption: he behaves "like a philosopher" simply reminding his friend that such letters are highly confidential.

I consulted Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading (Flamingo), which was published in the same year as Gavrilov's and Burnyeat's articles. Manguel believes that the passage in Augustine is "the first definite instance [of silent reading] recorded in western literature". He is well aware of the evidence to the contrary, but he finds it unconvincing. Thus Manguel: "According to Plutarch, Alexander the Great read letter from his mother in silence in the fourth century BC, to the bewilderment of his soldiers." [My italics.] But these bewildered soldiers are Manguel's importation. They have been brought into the story in order to make it seem exceptional. Manguel shamelessly fudges the argument.

In order to read aloud well, especially when a text is written without breaks between words (as was classical practice), it seems important to possess the gift to read ahead simultaneously. Silent reading is a necessary adjunct to the kind of reading aloud for sound and sense Nietzsche admired. What shocked Augustine was that Ambrose read silently in front of visitors and refused to share his reading matter, and his thoughts, with them. But Augustine was perfectly capable of silent reading, and describes a key moment in his conversion as a moment of silent reading with a friend. As Gavrilov concludes: "... the phenomenon of reading itself is fundamentally the same in modern as in ancient culture. Cultural diversity does not exclude an underlying unity."